CS:GO reaches 66,000 active players days after Valve push separate release on Steam

On March 3rd, Valve made the sudden and surprising decision to re-release Counter-Strike: Global Offensive as a separate title on Steam after previously relegating the 2012 title to be a separate legacy branch on the Counter-Strike 2 launcher. Despite the title featuring no official matchmaking, a working inventory system, and a number of other creature comforts, the decision by Valve has seen the game explode in popularity, with 66,000 players logging time on CS:GO over the past three days.

It's impossible to know how many players were running the CS:GO legacy branch on Counter-Strike 2 so we have no point of comparison for how many people were playing CS:GO before March 3rd, however it isn't hard to imagine the ease of access to the game has seen interest spike in the title.

In fact, according to SteamDB, CS:GO is currently the 25th most popular title on Steam, currently nestled between 2013's Grand Theft Auto V and 2011's Terraria (oh how time flies).

While Valve have explicitly forbid TOs from running CS:GO tournament there's no reason to suspect a dedicated community won't continue playing the game for years to come much like Counter-Strike: Source's loyal 20k players and even Counter-Strike's 12k strong contingent.